The Horror Fiction Sweet 16 Have Been Chosen!

It is done. Chuck and I have read and scored all one-hundred and four valid submissions for the Stuff You Should Know Horror Fiction Contest. (A few poor souls’ entries didn’t fall into the requirements and were disqualified for things like falling under the word count or submitting late, we’re sorry to report.) We have pored over the 300,000 to 400,000 words that amounted to about 600 pages and what has emerged is the sweet sixteen, the highest-rated submissions. We now submit these to you, our beloved listeners, to choose which one will be read for our annual Halloween show. We have entered the sinister phase two of our contest.

Over the course of four weeks, we’ll hold a bracket-style final championship where the sixteen finalists will go head to head to amass the most votes to move to the next round. At the end only one horror entry will be left standing. We’ve published the sixteen finalists on our blog and the bracket game links to them. Please, please read them before you vote. We assure you each one is worth it. One editorial note: We hemmed and hawed with the HowStuffWorks site director (Tracy Wilson to whom we owe a big thanks for helping put this contest together) over whether to copy edit the entries before publishing them and ultimately concluded we should pass them along to you guys in their pristine state, as they came to us. It’s just sensible. Okay, here’s a link to the 16 finalists’ entries, which will launch you off into a universe of terror. Once you’ ve read them all,  here’s a link to the voting bracket (starts Monday at 1:00 p.m.).

But, wait! We first want to say thank you very, very much to everyone who took the time to trust us with their writing. We got a lot of really great submissions and every day we sat down to read them it occurred to us that we were in a pretty special place that we get to read contributed horror fiction for a living. Pretty sweet. It was like we got to visit with 104 very different psyches and what resulted was a better understanding of both us and the larger world around us. For example:

Some people would love to see us bumped off. This is evidenced by the multiple submissions that used us as characters either pitted us against one another or put us through horrible torture and terror before killing us. This includes, but is not limited to, the submission where Chuck murders me because I psychologically torment him with my smug, superior intellect.

Heroin’s kind of big right now. If a drug popped up in a story, the chances were it was heroin. Chuck and I were not aware it was the 1930s all over again. Mescaline and LSD also made appearances and alcohol was a common theme, especially among submissions where the main characters were writers, interestingly enough.

Hipsters are not looked upon fondly. In a surprising number of the stories, hipsters were either abused (gleefully) with violence or were at the least derided by the main characters. We thought this was kind of funny.

The economy was the vilest character of them all. The recession economy emerged again and again as main character after main character was forced to stick with a physically or supernaturally dangerous job because his or her options were limited. We thought this proved an excellent and handy device, but found it fairly depressing that it came up so frequently. We look forward to the time when horror fiction ends abruptly and without much event because the main character just leaves the sinister job for a sunnier one with no problems.

A lot of people hike. Or are familiar with the out-of-doors at least. Possibly the most frequent setting for submissions (beside the workplace of a crappy job) was the woods or a hiking trail or the like. Tents were involved. It worked as an excellent creepy backdrop.

Thank you to all of you who sent us your submissions. We think very highly of your bravery, as neither Chuck nor I are necessarily courageous enough to submit any of our stuff anywhere. We feel like each of you shared something really special with us because you feel like you know us.  Normally, it’s kind of one-sided, what with us doing all the talking, but in this case, we feel like we got to know 104 of you now too. Thanks for that.

Okay, now go read and then go vote! We’ll see you at Halloween.